Tag Archives: Protagonist

I had an interesting interchange with a colleague, Karen Swim, President of Words for Hire in Detroit, on social media recently. The thing that prompted our discussion was her posting of this article from Forbes about a new analytics program called Protagonist which is claimed to help “better manage communications strategies.”

That sounds good, and if it does what it says it does it could be very meaningful, but I have my concerns for one simple reason. Computer programs are only as objective and (ironically) as analytical as the programmers who create them. If the creators have a very specific worldview, that worldview becomes the benchmark against what all other data will be analyzed and judged.

While I have not used the program in question, my point to Karen was that the red flag for me was that the program was described as being “free from bias.”

Karen’s thoughtful reply: “The issue is not in having biases, we all do, but acknowledging them and allowing for differing perspectives and opinions.”

Yes!!!

In recent weeks, I’ve seen countless articles on what were the big stories of 2017 and what were people’s predictions for 2018. I’ve learned not to try to predict, but there are some trends worth watching. One of them will be the continued evolution of technologies that are designed to replace human analytical thinking.

Consider artificial intelligence and machine learning. From self-driving cars to robots that can enter hazardous environments, sparing human lives. These all show great promise.

But before we surrender too much of our thinking to our digital minders, I’d offer this. When we start to dive deep into the development of communications strategies, when we have to identify biases, issues and concerns, in the end, we have to confront our own biases, our own worldviews and factor them into our own analysis of the data that’s before us.

This all starts with the acceptance of the notion that no one has exclusive claim to the truth. A respect for other points of view can be very situational, and very much based on emotion, morals and ethics in ways a software program cannot adequately take into account.

From there we can create context, the kind of context our clients and organizations need to make informed decisions. Not just factually informed decisions based on algorithms and what attitudes seem to be trending online. Rather, the best communications decisions are ones that are informed by offline factors such as emotion, experience, common sense, empathy and an understanding of human nature that all still rely on skilled and experienced professionals to interpret and manage.